“And not Trishul or any of the other warheads?” said her husband’s colleague. She smiled politely and refused to indicate that she’d understood, then fanned herself gently with a magazine.

As Aquib Javed bowled the first ball, the crowd’s voice swelled in a hum and then subsided again. On the television screen, Tendulkar’s bat, its face as remorseless as its staunch owner’s, descended straight on the ball and hit it onto the ground. A deep thud, magnified by the microphone in the stump, accompanied this event.

“Hey! Hey!” said Khatau. “Look, bhai.”

The camera had come to rest, in innocence, on the face of a man scratching his cheek.

“It’s our man, bhai! It’s our bridegroom, who left at the wedding!”

The camera now withdrew prudently to a safer place, a minor and timid crook in a nasty area. Then, panning from a group of agitated men holding up a sign saying TON-dulkar, it framed the man who’d been scratching his cheek thoughtfully moments earlier, sitting next to the chairman of the Board of Cricket Control and his wife and, a few seats to the right, Urmila Deshpande, who seemed absorbed in the course of the match.

“Saala!” said Yusuf; and his mouth remained open.

“Don’t abuse your brother-in-law,” said Khatau, but he didn’t feel like laughing.

The man who’d almost blown up Bombay, who’d had bombs placed in Nariman Point and Dadar and eleven other places, had taken care to wear a pale, pressed green shirt, and had probably had a haircut; he now took out a cell phone. With excessive politeness, he spoke a few words into the receiver. His face, when in close-up, revealed a ravaged and uneven skin.

*   *   *

THERE WERE sixty runs on the board, forty-six of them made by Tendulkar off fifty balls, when the sky darkened. The weather reports had made no predictions; the batsmen looked up at what little they could see of the sky. The floodlights dimmed.

“Oh dear, oh dear, it seems like a dooststorm,” said Boycott.

The women in the expensive seats looked uneasy; their husbands laughed in their suits and belligerently talked business with one another. A man leaned forward and said something in Ummar Aziz’s ear. Tony Greig and Gavaskar initiated a detailed discussion of the match so far, and replays of a brighter time, when batsmen had played their shots in the light of day, began to be shown.

“Chai lau?” said a ten-year-old boy in shorts.

“No, idiot,” said Khatau. “What, tea at this time of the night?” Reprimanded, the boy sat down quietly, and gratefully, on the floor before the television.